by Janny Wurts
‘Fiark,’ that small person supplied. ‘Would you take us aboard?’
‘The fat man can carry the board instead of you.’ Feylind elbowed a place at her brother’s side. ‘Anybody can see he’s a layabout. The work should do him good.’
‘I’m no man’s servant,’ Dakar pronounced, dropped bonelessly prone with his eyes closed.
For answer, the monstrous beam walloped flat on the strand a handspan from his right ear. Riled to a leap of shocked nerves, Dakar unwisely scrambled upright. A ticklish flood of sand grains trickled down his collar and clung to his sweat-dampened skin. ‘Damn you! I won’t fetch and haul as your labourer!’
Alone with a vacant barrel and a gouged smattering of footprints, the Mad Prophet spun around to find the Master of Shadow halfway back up the gangway. On his heels, irrepressible, Feylind capered, with Fiark behind, stamping on the planks to make them bounce.
Dakar cupped his temples to contain his throbbing agony and shouted, You can’t take those youngsters on board! The captain will never allow it.’
Arithon ignored him. Feylind twirled about and stuck out her tongue, while Fiark screamed back an obscenity, then taunted, ‘He’s master. He’ll do as he pleases!’
Dakar shrugged in a last, fruitless effort to jog the grit out of his clothing. Through the pounding in his skull and the reeling assault of strong sunshine, a chill stabbed over his skin. For just an instant, the salt breeze in his nostrils hung tainted with fire-caught smoke. Too cross to sort whether his distress was due to overindulgence, or some stillborn pang of gifted prophecy, he slapped his forehead and hauled off in pursuit.
The tide had turned. Sluiced by receding waters, the sloop’s keel grounded and wedged fast. Her sails were inelegantly stripped. Agleam in a coat of wet varnish, her bare gaffs creaked and swung as her decks laid over and canted. Her waist was a cat’s-cradle of lines and topping lifts, unstowed since her spars were unshackled. Progress for the inebriated became a trial of slipped steps and hooked ankles, overseen by jeering, half-naked sailors. Wise enough not to assay the slope of afterdeck companionway, the Mad Prophet latched his hands to the ladder’s top rung and fastened himself upright to eavesdrop.
The vessel’s grizzled captain braced against the dazzle of white decking, one brawny arm crooked through the backstay. ‘The lighterman will ferry your dowels of locust wood,’ he was saying to Arithon s’Ffalenn. ‘The heavier planks will be delivered by a fisherman who hires himself out as stevedore. That covers the last of your lading list. I saw your plans. Shell be a pert little craft.’
‘Thank you.’ Attended by the twins, Arithon fished out a small pouch. ‘The arrangements are sufficient.’ Fiark admired the clever fingers as they dealt out smart payment in royals. ‘If you’re willing, I need another service.’
The coin changed hands and vanished into a greasy leather purse. Politely attentive, the captain said, ‘Name your wants.’
‘Shipwrights.’ Bored by the talk, the twins began to tag each other’s toes around the pinrail, while Dakar strained his ears over their rowdy noise to catch the last of Arithon’s request. ‘… and one master craftsman if he brings journeymen versed in his trade.’
The captain’s leathery forehead furrowed. ‘Whatever for? You’ve got only one set of took.’ They’re prototypes.’ Arithon sidestepped to avoid getting clobbered as the twins fell reeling into giggles and tussled like puppies at his feet. ‘The smith here at Merior will be skilled enough to make more.’
‘If not, there’s a chandler’s downcoast in Shaddorn. That harbour’s more sheltered, if you want my opinion, and the southcoast trade galleys call there.’ The captain chewed his moustache, distracted from inquisitive speculation by a shout and a lurch as the ship keeled another three degrees and a loose object banged belowdecks. He leaned sidewards to bellow down a hatch grating. ‘I thought you had everything stowed!’
The cabin steward’s invective spiralled up.
‘Well blight take your excuses! Get a line and lash the forsaken thing down!’ He turned back to his client with scarcely-veiled interest and no measurable improvement in temper. ‘When do you want these craftsmen?’
‘Spring will do.’ Jostled by eight-year-old exuberance, Arithon knelt, flung out an arm, and rescued Fiark or Feylind from a skidding slide through the cordage. Blond curls mingled with black as he arose with the child pinned in his embrace.
The captain scratched his ear. ‘Autumn would be easier. Skilled men without ties are tough to come by.’
Arithon swayed as the other twin fastened like a lamprey to his thigh. ‘I can offer rich pay, for everybody.’ The coins he produced with the finesse of a spell arched through the air, light licking gold faces as they fell.
The captain fielded the bribe and bared his sly teeth in a smile. ‘Your shipwrights shall arrive with the violets.’
‘What are violets?’ shrieked the twin who pounded on Arithon’s hipbone.
Feylind, presumably, answered. ‘They’re flowers, fishhead. The ground here’s too salty to grow them.’
‘You don’t know everything,’ Fiark retorted.
‘No, she doesn’t,’ Arithon agreed, and silenced the fracas by prying the sister off his neck. ‘Don’t bicker, or you won’t get your tour belowdecks.’ To the captain, laughing, he added, ‘Would you mind?’
Drawn grinning into conspiracy, the hard-bitten waterman relented. ‘Take them yourself, but go lively. In another half hour, this bitch’ll be aground hard as Sithaer, and ornery as a half-skint wyvern for the pinch o’ the sand in her planks. Keep clear of the hold lest the ballast shifts.’
Slithered in a heap at the base of the companionway to evade notice as the conference ended, Dakar hugged his knees in stark misery. ‘I knew it,’ he mused in private conclusion. ‘I just knew it! He’s brought planks to build a damned war fleet.’
Immediately above, Arithon’s face eclipsed the light. ‘Right now, just one small sloop. You needn’t fret. We haven’t the coin left to arm her.’ Under pressure from Feylind’s impatience, a malicious glint stirred the green eyes. ‘You’re not in the mood to get stepped on, I trust.’
‘The fat man’s in the way again!’ the insufferable Fiark proclaimed. Forced to give ground in a cloud of ill grace, Dakar heaved up his tipsy bulk and moved.
From the stem, his weathered face crinkled in calculation, the sloop captain tracked Arithon’s answers to the children’s eager questions. ‘Knows his lines and halyards like a man born to blue water.’ The old salt cast his moody gaze at the horizon as though stalked by invisible foul weather. ‘Why in the name of mayhem would anyone found a shipyard in a site that grows not a stick of native timber?’
But the fat drunkard who might have lent insight now snored in an oblivious sprawl by the gangway. The captain spat downwind in disgust, then dispatched a sail-hand to heave the sot ashore before he tumbled overboard and drowned underfoot in the shallows.
In obstinate refusal to permit the earlier, unsettled stir through his senses to give rise to his spurious talent for prescience, Dakar slept off his binge. Wakened to an aftertaste of dread, as if the visions jammed irresponsibly beyond recall had scalded their imprint in dreams, he sat hunched over dinner at a split-plank trestle in Merior’s only boarding house.
The tea grounds in his mug streaked the landlady’s white porcelain in ominous, unlucky patterns, and his brooding bought no peace of mind. While southern moths like antique lace battered the smoke-hazed tin lantern overhead, Arithon plied thread and needle to patch his second-best shirt.
‘Shipwrights!’ Fired by long-delayed pique, Dakar curled his cup in a rocketing slide that scattered through knives, chinked the honey pot, and caromed off a platter littered with fish bones.
Arithon shed his mending on hair-trigger reflex and rescued the mug before it shot off the table rim.
Balked of even that destructive satisfaction, the Mad Prophet raged, ‘Who’s going to finance your fool’s notion, anyway? There’s not enough coi
n in this whole village for you to sing for your upkeep.’
Then you might be more gentle with the landlady’s crockery. Or tomorrow we’ll eat baitfish served raw on a cutting block.’ Green eyes regarded him, thoughtful; and in the same tone as the banter came the answer Dakar least expected. ‘I thought the crown of Rathain should bear the expense.’
‘Your emeralds are safe back at Althain.’ Had the tea mug remained in his hands, Dakar would have thrown to draw blood.
The knife-edged start of a smile compressed the line of Arithon’s mouth. ‘A pity, since you’re hot to lay into me for something.’
Too tender to provoke s’Ffalenn temper head-on, Dakar attacked on a tangent. ‘Well where will we live in the meantime? You can’t want to stay until spring.’ He dared not spell out the obvious: that the upheavals in Jaelot and Alestron were going to stir trouble. Elsewhere, two armies amassed to kill off the s’Ffalenn bloodline could scarcely stand idle at the news.
As though content to do nothing in response, Arithon watched the moths flare up and die in fitful spits of flame. A milk-warm, tropical breeze played through latched-back, diamond-paned casements, textured with salt and the taint of tidewrack and fish.
‘Winter is coming everywhere else,’ Dakar prodded. ‘The Scimlade peninsula doesn’t get frost, but in case no one told you, it rains buckets here.’
‘I’ve leased the shell flats by the abalone cutter’s.’ Arithon spun the mug in a curling slide that missed soup bowls and plates by narrow margins, then thumped in an accurate jab to the nerve in the Mad Prophet’s dimpled elbow. ‘If you want to try carpentry, we’ve plenty of wood for a shack.’
‘I can scarcely drive nails when I’m sober.’ The Mad Prophet lapsed into offended silence.
By morning, he was once again comatose, and Arithon had to borrow a handcart to remove him to the site where his lumber lay. Dakar snored on through the ride, his arms and knees dangling, and his bearded chin tipped to the sky. Arithon dumped him in the shade to sleep off his poisoned stupor, then took stock of his future boat, stacked now in neat piles that beckoned to be shaped with adze and saw and plane.
The twins found him in less than an hour. Every minute after that, they infested the shell flats like a hopping plague of locusts, until every step a man took seemed encumbered. The Mad Prophet was slowest to differentiate between them. When he misnamed Feylind, she screamed at him until his ears rang; her brother preferred to throw stones. Arithon never minded their boisterous noise. Obstructive whenever the future was mentioned, he tousled the twins’ hair like young puppies and stopped Fiark’s arguments by letting him hold the ends of his chalk strings.
They just lost their father to the sea,’ the Shadow Master explained on the day Dakar woke to find his bootlaces kinked into knots. Lately discharged of a vociferous lecture on the topic of children who should be home in strict charge of their family, he was in no mood to listen as Arithon added, ‘The mother has forbidden them to sail since he drowned, and in case you hadn’t noticed, in Merior, only infants and the sick stay ashore.’
One boot half off, the other ingeniously entangled, Dakar looked up into green eyes untrustworthy for their mildness. ‘So why do you stay ashore?’
‘For my amusement,’ the Shadow Master said.
Rankled again by the queer, warning ripple of impending prophecy, Dakar bit his lip, hard. The coppery taste of blood killed the vision’s deployment fast enough. But peace of mind did not return. Eaten by nameless foreboding in the face of Arithon’s complaisance, the Mad Prophet found no comfort in his vices. Every girl he pinched was somebody’s wife, and twice he got pummelled by packs of brothers led by a wronged and vengeful husband. Merior’s villagers were closemouthed and reserved, and their town, a dull backwater that made the bigoted stews of Jaelot seem a wistfully remembered time of paradise.
The days shortened; the fishing luggers sailed reefed to stronger winds, and the sandspit south of Scimlade Tip abided in its customary idyllic isolation. Arithon made no clandestine effort to stay abreast of events in the north. His easy-going humour under needling was just another sham, the sort of masterful, guileless fabrication his s’Ffalenn wiles employed to mask havoc. His work might seem unhurried, as he measured his fine wood in whistling patience. But the little sloop’s keel was laid and her stem post set in the sort of studied, sustained effort that admitted no loophole for setback.
Like the baitfish before the barracuda, Dakar discovered he was unable to bury himself in detachment. Complaints became excuse to provoke arguments. ‘A man could get permanently griped on a diet of saltfish,’ he broke in after a laboured visit to the privy. ‘And sleeping under sail canvas has me rotten with sores like the pox.’
‘That might not be the case had you bought black beans and figs instead of that beer keg from the market.’ Arithon bent to shape a raw plank, shirtless, the shiny lines of old scars browned by the sun.
‘Curse you!’ Dakar dug his fingers behind his waistband to scratch. ‘They haven’t sold figs or beans since the last cart returned from Shaddorn, and that’s been better than a week.’
The adze sheared off a pallid scroll of wood. ‘Six days.’
‘Curse you!’ Tired of the ocean, the heat, and the unending, brain-stabbing headaches brought on by the dastardly hours of banging required for maritime construction, Dakar jettisoned tact. ‘All so that you can wreak vengeance in ships crammed to the gunwales with arbalests.’
Arithon paused, his tool stilled in warning between strokes. ‘You speak like a master taleteller,’ he said in pleasant deceit. ‘Halliron would have applauded. I’ve only got enough wood for one vessel. A sloop. Thirty feet to the inch, and if I use sword steel or stone shot for ballast, the quarries in Elssine will have run out of honest grey stone.’
Half-inebriated, his tunic undone to the waist, Dakar lashed back in cornered fury. ‘Who are you fooling? You know you are cursed. Lysaer is amassing armies while you dawdle, and-’
‘What am I supposed to do?’ The adze scythed down in a vicious, white flare of reflection and sheared off a sliver of spruce. ‘Agree? Make you promises? Confide?’ In the sudden stabbing sarcasm he used when a nerve had been struck, Arithon smiled. ‘Much better to leave you dangling, Prophet. You’re far less bother to me, drunk. Failing that, you might consider washing your underclothes. They’re stiff enough to stand by themselves. If they rot from neglect, well all watch you greet Etarra’s armies bare-arsed.’
‘Oh, but you’re careful, and nasty in your arrogance.’ Dakar narrowed foxy eyes, suffused to a high, purple flush. You daren’t mention your nemesis by name, do you? What about this town? It is innocent. You’ll draw the danger to your web, sure enough. Do you tell me, will the children once again pay the cost?’
He had gone too far.
Blood drained on a breath out of Arithon’s face. His green eyes watched, flat and fixed as a cat’s. Lanced in the grip of raw fear, Dakar scrambled back, hands upraised to discharge a spell-ward of guard at the first twitch of movement from his enemy, for one twist of muscled hands could hurl the adze in a stroke pitched to murder.
‘Ath forfend!’ said Arithon s’Ffalenn. He raised a wrist and stifled back a belly whoop of laughter. ‘Dakar, what are you thinking? This is a pleasure sloop, and when she’s launched, I’m sailing her to Innish!’
A matter of a song and a widow denied reunion with her husband; the promise sworn at Halliron’s deathbed that Arithon now claimed his full intent to honour.
Caught aback inside a spitting crackle of sparks thrown off by the collapse of an inept conjury, lent no grounds to attack unimpeachable decency, Dakar broke off his challenge, unsatisfied. The sop he had been tossed to force his silence assuredly did not include the truth.
A month passed, and the graceful frame of Arithon’s sloop took shape on her ways on the shell flats. Fishermen returned from their dories began to stop and share news, or sometimes a fish from their catch. The reek of cod or halibut toasting over an open fi
re pervaded Dakar’s whisky-soaked dreams. The autumn equinox brought in the feast days, and the twins brought yarn strung with folded paper talismans. Through the lattice of the palm groves, candles burned on every cottage windowsill. Amid the bonfires and the dances to celebrate the summer’s harvest came the inevitable change to the wind patterns, and the driving, seasonal rains.
The deluge caught Dakar in a desperate, furious bout of hammering.
Indignant when the villagers dared to appreciate his discomfort too much, he retorted, ‘Well how can I see to bang a nail with Ath-forsaken water in my eyes?’
‘Wait till the rain stops,’ Arithon suggested.
Dakar missed stroke and mashed himself a black thumbnail. His subsequent explosion exhausted filthy epithets acquired through five centuries of debauchery. Every curse and full blame for the weather attached to the Master of Shadow, and the twins, apt mimics, filched the best phrases to malign Dakar.
Arithon gripped his ribs, a suspect expression on his face, while white runnels streamed off his hair. Since the downpour doused the. coal fire that fuelled his steambox, he used the chance to wash his clothes in a nail keg.
The children were kept home the next day.
‘In bed with coughs, their mother said,’ offered a fisherman in a syrup-slow, southshore dialect. Close with his words as a pinch-fist doling coins, he trudged with his fellows to launch the dories. But the wink he tossed over his shoulder gave fair warning: the widow whose household had been outraged by an influx of rough language might be along later to scold.
A moment of forethought, and Arithon sent Dakar on an errand.
The woman came between showers, a thin, stoop-shouldered figure swathed in the black skirts of mourning,her wisped hair muffled under an enormous oilskin. She carried sprigs of sage to ease her passage through the fishmarkets. Against the white sands and the wheeling gulls, and the silver-banked, cloud-silted sky, the storm harried her like an omen in beggar’s rags.
Lent a shore bird’s gait in her pattens, she picked her way past the puddles in the workyard as if apologetic for the crunch of her tread on the shavings. Met by sour smells of pine and wet oak, her swift, darting glance took in Dakar’s crude shack, the gapped, miscut boards and bent nails a flute for the tireless sea winds. The rough-sawn windows boasted no shutters, nor candles in honour of equinox. The little paper talismans brought by her twins hung tacked to the eaves, soggy and entangled in their tethers. Austere as fine muslin, she rounded the building and stopped with caught breath at the absolute shock of discrepancy: before her, in grace that bespoke patience and a loving touch with raw wood, rose the clean curves of a sloop’s frames. Neat, tight pegs fastened the stempost to her keel, under damp like a patina of new varnish.